"We had a company that was helping us with our website and these are lean times in the economy," Kings spokesman Chris Clark said. "They're in business one day, the next day they're gone."

And gone was the Kings' team shop website.

"In the e-commerce industry, it takes about four months to build a website from scratch, and the way the company went under it kind of left us in a lurch," Clark said.

Since June, fans haven't been able to see an online catalog of team merchandise and all orders have had to be made over the phone or in person at Power Balance Pavilion.

For those two-plus months—beginning in the NBA Finals, running through the draft, all the way up until today—clicking on the "Shop" link on the Kings' website took visitors to a black page with just a phone number, or when I checked it yesterday, an error message. Today, only after CBS Sacramento reported on the site's outage, the "Shop" link takes you to the Kings section of the NBA.com store, where all the same products can be purchased. This seems like a logical backup plan that should have been in place all along. The only possible explanation: for the bulk of the summer, no one even noticed the site's absence.

The Kings promise a new web store will be up and running within two weeks.